New website

Happily my new website is now up and running :

 

www.ciaramcmahon.com

Graham Harmon with Daniel  Fetzner about Objects and Waste.

 

 

Gee Grant : Patience After Sebald

Available for download here: Patients After Sebald

 

Traveling at night #2 (1990)

Chris Kraus : Traveling at Night #2 (1990), a study of the underground railroad filtered through a children’s field trip to caves that once sheltered slaves.

http://www.ubu.com/film/kraus_traveling.html

Dr. Tina Kinsella : Enjoying Liminal Pleasures?

I’m thinking a lot about the experience of liminality at the moment, in relation to embodied experience and our psychic life. It could be, perhaps, said that one of the primary embodied examples of a liminal state for every human, could be the intra-uterine life.  When you think about it, pregnancy is such a strange state for both the mother-to-be, and the foetus-child-to-be during pregnancy. I thus came across this paper by Dr.Tina Kinsella, NCAD discussing the Matrixial theory of Bracha Ettinger. The latter discusses, amongst other things,  how intra-uterine experience has implications for the development human subjectivity. Ettinger – and Kinsella – provide a refreshing alternative take on how we might respond to the experience of liminality, both within our pyschic and physical boundaries. The full paper is : Here

Kinsella asks some provocative questions at the close of the paper and invites us to imagine a sociopolitical society where an experience of primary in-betweeness is supported, accepted, incorporated, tolerated. How different would things be for that which is co-shared, cohabited and communal in our world. To quote Kinsella directly:

“Can we, as I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, very tentatively suggest the possibility that we, as subjects, are not only concerned with shoring up our somatic and psychical boundaries and policing the contours of our sovereign identities? Admit the possibility that there is a jouissance in transgressing beyond one’s borders beyond the socio-Symbolic Law that insists on the cut between discrete subjectivities to a beyond-as-before, immemorial, yet affecting, space / place / time of encounter? An “event-encounter ” (Ettinger) that appeals to a certain stratum of our subjectivity on which we are subjects who have never  been cleft from bodily  jouissance as our corporeal and psychical borders have always, already been transgressed? And with this in mind, is it possible that we look at images that evidence, or are purported to evidence, a signifying assignation between the maternal, femininity and death? Is it possible that we, as viewing subjects, are not only condemned to be consumers and spectators who re-inscribe this scene with such cultural markings and inscriptions? If we all emerge, regardless of sex or gender, from such maternal origins, unremembered as they may be or, as Ettinger suggests, immemorial yet affecting, then what happens to us as viewers when we re-inscribe such cultural markings? What happens to the maternal subjectivity, in each and every one of us, in the staging, re-staging and re-inscription of this traumatic encounter?

Can we accept our emergence into life, as non-life, as traumatic, but also as, potentially, re-traumatising when any discourse of this emergence is culturally foreclosed, or idealised as a phantasmatic return to a primal unity, or One?

When our very emergence into life is condemned to be aligned on the side of death?

Can we consider the possibility that there may be some kind of relief in the relaxation of one’s sovereign boundaries, of being a becoming partialised-subject, partialised-object? 

Can we countenance a jouissance of non-life in life, the conceptual possibility of an enjoyment, of sort, in liminal pleasures?

An enjoyment in liminality?”

Dr. Tina Kinsella, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Enjoying Liminal Pleasures?The Jouissance  of Becoming-Non-Life-in-Life  in the Photography of Francesca Woodman

Out now folks. See here : http://2hamagazine.tumblr.com/post/62728467761/2ha-issue-03-suburbia-public-space-is-now

 

 

 

The Master and his Emissary : Ian McGilchrist

The last couple of minutes of this McGilchrist raises some interesting thoughts on the societal effect, as he see it of Left hemispheric dominance in our dealings with World.